Two stars

The ancient French town of Baux de Provence has two claims to fame. The first is the mineral after which it is named, bauxite, found in abundance in the area and the second is L’Oustau de Beaumaniere, the hotel at the base of the fortified cliff-top town. When I visited Baux I knew just about enough about bauxite to fill the back of a postage stamp; but about Beaumaniere I knew absolutely nothing. So when my husband excitedly informed me that he had booked a table for lunch at the recommendation of a friend who knew the area well, I shrugged. We were on holiday in Provence and frankly, I was content to lie by our villa’s pool, munch on fresh figs and read my book.

‘You don’t understand,’ said my husband, who has the same sort of enthusiasm for restaurants as I do for historical fiction. ‘It’s a two star Michelin restaurant, considered one of the greatest in Southern France. It’s French haute cuisine with a Provencal twist. And the hotel it’s in is historic. Churchill stayed there and the Aga Khan and Mick Jagger and Picasso. It’s a big deal.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said.

From the outside the hotel looked like a large, prosperous Provencal farmhouse built of the honey-coloured stone typical of the area. There was a pretty garden with lavender and rosemary bushes and citrus trees and a swimming pool. It had a terrace to one side shaded by the spreading branches of an old tree and stretching away into the distance, acres of vineyards. We had a table on the terrace. Though I had been reluctant to come, I had to admit that within half an hour of being there I had begun to see the point of L’Oustau de Beaumaniere. There was something about the scent of lavender, the warm sun, the dappled light on the terrace, the buzz of bumble bees among the lemon trees, the pristine white linen on the table, the chilled drinks, the warm bread, crisp on the outside, soft and crumbly on the inside, that filled me with a sense of well being. Service was unhurried yet attentive and oh so charming. Suffice it to say, I was enjoying myself.

[quote]'It says here 'Chef de cuisine Sylvestre Wahid'. Sounds vaguely Muslim'[/quote]

I hate to admit this but I was so seduced by the experience that beyond remembering that it was all utterly, utterly delicious, I have only a hazy memory of what I actually ate. I had sea food for starters, then meltingly tender unstinky lamb, followed by a heavenly chocolate pudding with salted caramel ice cream. Ask me not of sauces, of sides, of foams, of accompaniments, of reductions, of trimmings for I do not recall a thing. All I knew was that I had been on a culinary trip to heaven and had returned not feeling sluggish and overloaded as I often have after a classical French meal but just pleasantly full and very, very happy.

We had asked for the bill when my father-in-law picked up the menu card and said, ‘It says here ‘Chef de cuisine Sylvestre Wahid’. Sounds vaguely Muslim.’

‘Probably half French, half Moroccan or Algerian,’ I said.

When the maître de returned we asked him about the chef.

‘Moroccan, right?’ I asked.

‘Non, non,’ he replied. ‘I think he is Pakistanee. Yes, he is Pakistanee.’

‘Pakistani?’ Surely there must have been a mistake? What Pakistani could cook French haute cuisine and win two Michelin stars? It couldn’t be.

‘Would you like to meet him?’

Would I…? ‘ Yes! Yes, please.’

‘Let me see if he’s still here because the lunch service, it is now ended.’

He disappeared back into the restaurant and a few minutes later returned to say that the chef had unfortunately left but his younger brother, the chef patissier, was still here and would be happy to meet us. So I followed the maître de into the kitchen – a big spotless space with whitewashed walls and lots of stainless steel – and there stood a pale-skinned, dark-haired young man, probably in his early 30s, with a Bart Simpson hair cut. The name embroidered on his breast pocket was Jonathan Wahid.

Because my French is non-existent, I spoke to him in English. Having introduced myself I let loose. I asked him where he was from. How did he come to be here? How long had he worked here? Where was his family?

He smiled, frowned, looked puzzled, laughed and finally said, ‘My English, it is not so good. You know French?’

‘Sadly no.’ Aside from a man mopping down the floor and us, the kitchen was empty. Since it was now almost 3 pm, most of the staff had gone home. There was no one at hand to translate.

[quote]His birth name was Jawad and he was a Pathan from Kohat[/quote]

I sighed.

‘You know Urdu?’ he asked.

‘Yes! Aur aap?’

‘Thorhi, thorhi.’ He laughed.

And so over the next half hour he told me about himself in his halting, heavily accented Urdu. His birth name was Jawad and he was a Pathan from Kohat. (He pronounced it Kou’aat.) His father had left Kohat and come to Europe about thirty years ago and once established in France, had sent for them. They settled in the Provencal city of Nimes, where their father worked, his elder brother Shahzad, aka Sylvestre, himself, and his two sisters, Kiran (now Cecily) and Nadja. Shahzad had chosen to be a chef early on and gradually the whole family had gravitated towards the culinary world. His sister Kiran ran a pastry shop with her husband in nearby St Remy, his French wife was the chef at a restaurant in another local village called Mausanne (where, incidentally we had rented a villa) and his parents helped out with looking after the grandchildren.

By now it was well past closing time, so we agreed to meet again to talk some more for I still had plenty of questions left. Over the next few days I met with Abdul Wahid, the paterfamilias, Sylvestre, the brilliant chef, Cecily the sister and of course Jonathan and pieced together their most extraordinary story.

In the early 1970s, Abdul Wahid was a young man living in Kohat. He was married with three small children and a fourth on the way. His wife was also good-looking and energetic. By the standards of the time and place, Abdul Wahid was relatively well to do. His father owned a soap factory and he, the only son, had just taken over its day-to-day running.

‘We had a car, servants, a decent house,’ recalled Abdul Wahid, ‘but I was not happy. My father and I had developed deep differences over the business and we had bad quarrels. I didn’t want to work for him any longer but there were few other opportunities in Kohat and with a young family to support, I had to find something else.’ So when a group of young men from Kohat floated the idea of going to Europe in search of a livelihood, Abdul Wahid scraped together his savings and enthusiastically joined in. He assured his anxious wife that he would send for her as soon as he was established and so saying he left for Europe.

‘My travelling companions teased me. They said I was soft, a rich man’s son. In no time, I’d start missing home. I was determined to prove them wrong.’

They fetched up in Germany and as the weeks turned to months and their savings ran out without any prospect of employment, they grew despondent. Some of them returned home.

‘But I couldn’t do that. How could I return empty handed? What face would I show my father? My wife?’

One day, while deep in the doldrums, Abdul Wahid bumped into a German man at a café who gave him a tip. There was a French company recruiting for employees. They didn’t seem to require any experience and weren’t fussy about nationality. Lots of local men had gone for interviews. Abdul Wahid jumped up and ran off to the address the German gave him. The German had been right. A recruitment drive was indeed underway and no prior experience was needed for the job. The company would not only pay you, but look after your expenses, post you around the world to lots of exotic locations and at the end of five years give you and your family French nationality. The only snag was that if you accepted the job you had to sign off five years of your life in which you assumed a new identity and could not contact your family or friends from your past life. The ‘company’ was the French Foreign Legion, renowned as one of the toughest fighting forces in Europe. The motto of the Legion is March or Die and training is meant to be not only physically hard but psychologically stressful. Abdul Wahid made a quick call to his wife to explain the situation and signed up.

[quote]He became a French soldier with the Legion[/quote]

He became Henri and learnt to be a French soldier with the Legion, serving in different places all over the world. Though a full fledged soldier, Abdul Wahid was put in charge of the mess and had to organise supplies of food and running of the kitchens. After five years, he was given a French passport and allowed to call his family over. It was now 1984 and his eldest son Shahzad was ten.  His youngest daughter, Nadja was five and had never seen her father. He brought them to Nimes where the Legion had posted him and enrolled all four children in a local French school. He bought them western clothes and insisted they start speaking French. ‘You have to adapt to this country,’ he told them. ‘Not the other way around.’

‘I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me,’ said Sylvestre. ‘I sat at the back of the class with my head in my hands. There was no way I could pass the school leaving exams, let alone go to university.’ While he was a laggard at school, there was one place he came alive: in the Mess’s kitchens. ‘There,’ remembers Abdul Wahid, ‘he would be full of curiosity, asking questions, lifting the lids off the pots, sniffing, tasting, sipping.’ At 15, Shahzad dropped out of school and announced to his parents that he wanted to be a chef. His mother immediately burst into tears. ‘I had always wanted my sons to be doctors, engineers,’ she wailed. His father was more pragmatic. ‘By all means be a chef if you want, but be the best.’

[quote]'You have to adapt to this country,' their father told them. 'Not the other way around'[/quote]

And so began a long and illustrious career that saw him training with the likes of Alain Ducasse and Thiery Marx in Paris and New York. Working long, hard hours, (‘Some nights I’d go home at 1am, to return to the kitchen at 6 am’) Shahzad, now Sylvestre, earned his stripes in French classical cuisine. When he was approached by Jean-Andre Charial, owner of L’Ousteau de Baumaniere, the venerable old restaurant had recently lost a Michelin star. ‘I told M Charial that I would work for him on three conditions. One, I would appoint my own team. Two, I would redesign the menu. Three, my younger brother Jonathan would be the chef de patissier.’ Jonathan had by now risen to be a star in the firmament of French pastry chefs and was working at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. M Charial thought it over the next few days. There were people who had worked at the restaurant for 30 years. They were not likely to welcome a newcomer, a Pakistani at that, whose skin colour was nothing like theirs. But M Charial’s mind was made up. He offered the job to the Wahid brothers in 2003. Since then the restaurant has regained a star and become a two star restaurant again.

I asked the brothers what they wanted to do next. ‘Get a third star and then one day, maybe start our own restaurant.’

Though Abdul Wahid and his wife have been back to Kohat (Mrs Wahid skypes with her extended family regularly) their kids have not. But one day they do want to go see for themselves, they say. Meanwhile on his most recent trip to Kohat a few years back, Abdul Whaid was asked by some cousins what line of business had his boys chosen in France. ‘I could tell they were a little envious of what they thought was my ‘easy life’ in France. So when I told them my elder son was a khansamah and my younger son a halwai, they guffawed with laughter. That made them feel better.’